a chronicle of my coding discoveries

Using Terminal and GitHub

I’ve dipped a toe in the world of GitHub and Terminal over the past few weeks. I’m still getting a grasp of how to use them, but here are the basics I’ve figured out so far.

A computer terminal is used to enter data. The Terminal app on my Mac opens to a shell (on Mac known as Bash) where I can type command lines. According to this handy MacWorld article, “a command has three elements to it; the command itself, which calls a specific tool, an option which modifies the command’s output, and an argument, which calls the resource on which the command will operate.”

I can manipulate where the command is executed by changing or adding directories. (“cd /Users/rachel/homework” changes directory to this preexisting directory, for example. I can see which directory I’m in by entering “pwd.”)

Changes made in Terminal to a forked project from GitHub can be uploaded back into GitHub (after doing Git add and Git commit in terminal), and a pull request can be submitted. A pull request notifies others working on the project of my changes, so they can review and choose to add.